Life science companies are no strangers to data, so it would be easy to assume they are adept at making innovative use of huge amounts. Not necessarily. A tradition of rigorous scientific method and clinical trial hasn’t prepared them for the shifting inundation of big data or all its baffling potential. If anything, the reliable, “clinically proven” analytical habits of former decades have hampered some manufacturers from leveraging data in new and needed ways.
Competition among ride-sharing companies is intensifying in Southeast Asia, a region where the growth of smartphone use is among the fastest in the world, and the number of smartphone owners could exceed 400 million by 2020.
New software solutions, designed to help companies digitalize their supply chains, are improving methods of carrying out field work. Transparency of productivity is becoming the driving force of quality optimization. By increasing oversight and collaboration, end-to-end digitalization solutions help both managers and workers jointly contribute to the quality of work, and simultaneously to the quality of worker-life.
Many people work on their goals by engaging in positive actions—hitting the gym, planning a trip, or taking guitar lessons. But they may be overlooking one of the most important tools for effecting change: the power of thought.
I love standards, and whether you know it, you love standards, too. For example, let’s say a bulb in your lamp goes bad. You drive down to the local hardware store, buy a bulb, come back home, change out the bulb, plug the lamp back in, and... it lights up. You just benefited from at least seven U.S. and international standards.
Imagine building a brand over decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in design and development. Sponsorships with celebrity athletes and professional and college teams. Leading-edge marketing making your company one of the top 20 brands in the world. It only takes one incident to unravel all this investment.
In the 1999 film Office Space, a dark comedy about the mundane conventionality of work, disgruntled software engineer Peter Gibbons tells his new love interest, Joanna, that he hates his job and doesn’t want to go anymore.
When Joanna, played by actress Jennifer Aniston, asks Peter whether he is going to quit, he responds, “Not really; I’m just going to stop going.”
In the manufacturing universe, metal tube fabrication is a world of its own. That being said, the requirements for developing a new world-standard solution for tube bending are common to all manufacturing—be faster, more accurate, and more economical.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Whitney Johnson, author of the book, Build an A Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018).
